Chapter Seventeen
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
We stay at that site until even our flashlights aren’t enough to illuminate properly, and when we do need to leave, I try not to grind my teeth in frustration. I have a new theory, which means a new way of looking at the scene.
That frustration is an excellent way to displace the horror of my new theory. Don’t think too much about it. Focus on the crime, not what occurred here to a living person. To a person I knew… by a person I know.
Pregnancy has been an emotional roller coaster for me. I’ve blamed the hormones, but I think, in some way, those hormones have only eroded long-erected walls. In my family, I was “the emotional one.” Is it possible, even in a moderately functional family, for that to be a good thing? For a child to be told they’re emotional or sensitive, and not hear it as a criticism? Being emotional or sensitive is considered a feminine quality. If you’re a boy, that’s bad. Even if you’re a girl, coached to be strong and independent, it’s bad.
I learned to box up those parts of myself, and now hormones have exploded those boxes. I cry easily. I get angry and frustrated more easily. But I’m also quicker to hug Dalton or tell him how much I appreciate him. I’m quicker to show affection and gratitude with everyone in my life.
Going forward, I’d like to stanch the tears and dowse the anger and control the frustration but retain that ability to show people that I love and value them. And if it’s not possible to have all that, then maybe keeping the tears and the rage isn’t entirely a bad thing.
Right now, though, I can’t use the rage or the tears. I need to set them aside or I’ll get caught up in the horror of what Lynn endured.
Once I had my theory, I was able to find more evidence to fit it. More fibers on that log. More marks in the snow where Lynn had lain. Marks that do nothing to keep the horror from seeping in, because they do not indicate a woman who’d been drugged senseless and died without regaining consciousness.
Stripped naked. Staked out on the ice. Screaming for help that would never come. Dying slowly and horribly… as her killer sat there and watched.
I might manage to process that scene. But I do not manage to squelch my horror or my rage.
Not for a second.
We’re back at the clinic with more questions for April. She’s run the tox screen, and it’s inconclusive. Was Lynn drugged and led out there, waking only after she’d been staked out? Or did Lynn trust her killer and let them lead her onto the ice before she realized they weren’t taking her home?
I’d expect to see signs of a fight once she understood she was in trouble, but that’s as wrong as assuming rape will always show physical trauma. She could have stripped willingly, certain if she just listened to her captor, he’d get it over with and she’d be released. But I can’t say—even knowing what I do—that I wouldn’t feel the tug of that solution.
Be a good girl. Do as you’re told, and this will all be over soon.
April does another, even more thorough check for sexual activity, but still finds none, and I don’t think she will. We made a mistake with Kendra. An understandable mistake. A woman was drugged in a bar and dragged into the woods. That means sexual assault, right? Usually, yes. But it could also mean that Kendra avoided Lynn’s fate.
Someone wants to commit a horrible murder. To watch someone die of hypothermia. They put drugs into one drink of a tray going to three women. Russian roulette. Whoever gets the dosed drink dies. That fails, but then a storm allows them to lead a different woman out of town the next night.
One new question for April is whether there’s any sign that Lynn was gagged. There isn’t, which takes this to another level of cruelty and confidence.
Whoever killed Lynn knew that if anyone heard her screams, it’d be mistaken for the wind. Was that even more exciting for them? Knowing someone might later realize they’d heard Lynn screaming for help and ignored it?
Leaving her free to scream might also have kept her from fighting as hard as she could. After all, town was right there. Surely someone would hear. Someone would come.
While it’s possible she was gagged and it left no physical evidence, I don’t think she was.
And that tells me a lot about the person I’m hunting.
I know what I need to do next, and I am physically, mentally, and emotionally incapable of doing it. That is excruciating for me to admit. I always thought motherhood would mean I’d need to be tougher, stronger, even more capable and independent than I already am, but I’m coming to wonder whether it’s going to require me to change in even more difficult ways. To become softer, letting those emotions in, and to be able to recognize my own limits and accept help. Even ask for help.
I do that today. I’m exhausted, and every ounce of energy I have left has been diverted to sorting out all the implications of what has happened. I need to find someplace dark and quiet so I can think. Yet someone also needs to tell Lynn’s husband that his wife is dead. So I ask Dalton to do that for me.
I hate giving him an ugly task, and I hate surrendering a vital interview. Who is the person most likely to have murdered Lynn? Her husband, and that has nothing to do with the state of their marriage. It’s pure statistics.
I should be there. But do I need to be there? Or can I trust Dalton to do this? I can, and I will.
He suggests videotaping the interview for me. He’ll have Anders bring Grant to the town hall, where Dalton will be waiting with a tablet set up to record video. I appreciate that so much I burst into tears, more proof that I desperately need a break.
I stay at home, jotting notes and making voice memos, curled up in my chair with Storm at my feet. When Dalton returns an hour later, he brings dinner… and the recording. He plays the video as we eat in the living room.
On the screen, Grant walks into the room and looks around. “Where’s the little woman? I thought that’s who I was talking to?”
Anders’s voice comes from the background. “I said Eric needed to speak to you about Lynn.”
“I figured you meant Casey did. Okay then.” He turns to Dalton, who must be off camera. “Since I haven’t seen my wife, I presume this is just to tell me she hasn’t turned up yet.”
“Actually, she has,” Dalton says. “Sit down.”
“Is that an order?”
Dalton had said it without any hint even of his typical brusqueness, and I note Grant’s reaction. On the defensive already? Or just being bristly, as usual?
“Please sit,” Dalton says. “I have bad news.”
I zoom the screen on Grant’s reaction. He goes still and then slowly focuses on Dalton.
“Bad news meaning you found her with Thierry after all?” Grant says.
“Your wife is dead.”
I hide my flinch at the bluntness of that, but I’m not sure I’d have made any other choice. Grant clearly wasn’t going to let Dalton ease into it.
I rewind ten seconds and zoom again to watch Grant’s face when he gets the news.
He just stares. Then he says, “What?”
“I’m sorry, Grant. Lynn is dead.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Grant steps toward Dalton. “Is this a joke?”
“She’s—”
“This is a prank, right? No, it’s a punishment. You think I’m a dick for not caring that my wife is missing, so you’re telling me this to scare me. Shock treatment. Teach me to give a damn. Well, I do give a damn. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be in this town.”
“Please sit—”
“I didn’t need to come here. She’s the one who got herself—” Grant bites off the words. “She’s the one who was in trouble. I chose to come with her, even after she found out I’d screwed around and told me I didn’t need to come. She said I could stay and keep the house and everything. I chose to come with her. And if it seems like I’m being a dick, maybe that’s because I don’t know how else to handle this. She wants revenge because I screwed around, and she deserves that. Doesn’t mean I need to like it. And it doesn’t mean I deserve this shitty prank—”
“It’s not a prank, Grant.”
“What?”
Dalton’s voice drops as if he’s trying for even more empathy. “Lynn is dead. Casey and I found her body.”
“What?” Grant shakes his head sharply. “No, you’re trying to scare me straight. Scare me into caring. I didn’t report her missing, and now you want me to realize what could have gone wrong.”
“I’m not, Grant. I’m really not.”
Anders speaks up. I thought he’d left, but he must have lingered in case of trouble.
“Eric wouldn’t joke about this,” Anders says. “He wouldn’t say something like that to scare you. No one here would. Casey and Eric found Lynn’s body. She’s in the clinic now.”
Grant only stares for at least ten seconds. Then he says, “I don’t understand. He… He killed her?”
“We don’t entirely know what happened at this point,” Dalton says. “If you mean Thierry—”
“Who else?” Grant’s voice rises as he rocks forward. “She was with Thierry, and now she’s dead. Obviously he killed her.”
“We have no—” On the video, Dalton cuts himself short. At the same time, beside me, Dalton hits Pause and turns to me. “I wasn’t sure what to do here. We’d agreed we wouldn’t say it was murder just yet, but I wasn’t sure whether I should get into what Marlon said—that he never claimed it was Thierry with Lynn. I decided I should leave that for you.”
“Good call.”
Dalton hits Play on the video. His off-screen voice says, “We are not entirely certain how Lynn died, but we have not eliminated any theories or suspects.”
“What happened? Where was she?”
There’s a pause, and beside me, Dalton’s jaw works as he mutters, “It was so tempting.”
I know what he means. So tempting to answer that with a lash of blame.
What happened? Your wife froze to death the night of the storm, because you didn’t bother telling us she never came home.
“We found her outside town,” Dalton says on the video. “We believe she died of hypothermia, but that’s still being investigated.”
“Hypo…? She froze to death?”
Another pause. This time, it’s Anders who answers. “In a manner of speaking. In these temperatures, hypothermia can set in quickly.”
“So she went with Thierry, and then tried to get back to our apartment and got lost? Froze to death in the forest?”
“We are continuing to investigate,” Dalton says. “We’re putting together a timeline now, and we hope to complete that soon. Casey will speak to you later.”
“Later?” Grant looks around. “Where the fuck is she? Isn’t she some kind of detective? My wife is dead and she’s, what, taking a nap?”
I flinch, even as Dalton’s hand squeezes my thigh.
On the video, Dalton answers with extreme care, each word clipped. “Casey was out searching for your wife after having a pregnancy scare. She is currently investigating. I decided to be the one to tell you, which isn’t part of the investigation.” A pause that extends a moment past comfort. “Unless it is. I’ll need you to account for your whereabouts last night and early this morning.”
“You’re asking me for an alibi ? What do you think I did? Dragged my wife out there to freeze to death?”
I hit Pause and rewind to watch Grant’s face while he says that. It’s all outrage and flashing eyes, but I make a noise deep in my throat, and Dalton nods.
“Little too close to what actually happened,” he murmurs.
“Hmm.”
I hit Play. There’s some back-and-forth, Grant indignant that Dalton would think he’d done this, while Dalton dives in hard.
“Home,” Grant says finally. “I was in our apartment all night, because there was a damn blizzard, and my wife was out screwing another guy. Was I sulking? Maybe, yeah.” He glances to one side. “But was I also thinking that it was my own damn fault? That I’d screwed around first?” He looks back at Dalton. “Yeah, I was. So I sat in my apartment, and I drank a couple of beers. The bottles are still there, if you want to check. And before you ask, no one saw me, because I was…” He meets Dalton’s gaze. “In my apartment.”
“When did you leave?”
“Eight o’clock this morning. I got up at seven, and Lynn wasn’t there, so I sulked for a bit. Then I went to have a shower. There was a lineup. I was behind Frank. He wanted to chat about the blizzard. Typical weather small talk. Some storm, huh, blah blah. I let him talk. By eight, I was joining another line, this one at the commissary, for breakfast that wasn’t coming because someone forgot to close the damn chimney. I was behind Dana and the boys. Didn’t say much more than hello. I left when it was clear we weren’t getting breakfast.” He stops. “How much more of this do you want?”
“That’s enough.” Dalton looks down at the bandage on Grant’s hand. “Remind me how that happened again?”
His jaw tenses. “Cutting wood.” He yanks back the bandage. “See? Not scratches from my wife trying to escape as I murdered her.”
I pause to look at the mark. It’s a cut, maybe an inch and a half long.
When I resume the video, on it, Dalton says, “Explain to me how you got that with an ax.”
“Putting it away, okay? I was careless.”
Dalton nods slowly, as if assimilating this, giving Grant time to worry that his explanation isn’t being accepted and embellish it. But Grant only says, “What about my wife? Do I get to see her?”
Silence as Dalton must be mentally shifting gears. This is the part that we’ve lost in all the chaos. When the husband is a suspect, it’s easy to forget he might be another victim—a man who just lost his wife.
“There needs to be an autopsy,” Dalton says, skimming over the fact that there’s already been one. “You can see her after that.”
“Autopsy? For what? She froze to death.”
“I said that seems to be the cause of death. The autopsy is underway to confirm that.”
“Underway?” Grant says. “What if I don’t want that done to her?”
“If we even remotely suspect foul play, we don’t give suspects the right to determine whether or not the victim is autopsied.”
“But she didn’t want that. For…” He seems to struggle for an excuse. “Religious reasons.”
“Then that would have been in her file, which it was not. Is there a problem here, Grant? Something you maybe want to tell me before we find out?”
Grant sits back abruptly. “I just know she didn’t want to be cut up. She wasn’t even an organ donor. It freaked her out.”
“Then I’m sorry she didn’t put that information in her file, but even if she had, we might have still needed to overrule her wishes.”
“So what happens next? I get to go home, right? Down south?”
Silence. Then Dalton says, “Why would you think that?”
“Because she’s gone, and she’s the reason we were here. I need to take her home for a funeral.”
“That isn’t how this works, Grant. All that was in the paperwork you both signed before you came up.”
This, too, is something new, and a lot more complicated. With Rockton, arriving alone meant we didn’t need to worry about next of kin. When you came to Rockton, you disappeared, and if you didn’t make it home, you just stayed disappeared.
Dalton continues, “Lynn will be buried here with a proper funeral. Then, when you return, you will be provided with all documentation regarding her death, including cremains, if needed. As for leaving, that can all be figured out later. After we finish our investigation.”